It is common practice for consumers to pay a merchant electronically for goods or services received. Electronic payments are typically made with a token that identifies a source of funding. For example, a credit card containing a magnetic strip is a token. Payment tokens usually contain static information, such as an account number, identifying a source of payment. When a credit card is swiped through a reader at the point of sale (POS), the card number is obtained and transmitted to a centralized payment-processing system. More specifically, the reader is operatively connected to a POS terminal, different models of which vary in terms of complexity but generally include cash-register functionality to accept manual input, communications capability and, in many cases, item-scanning hardware. The POS terminal obtains the consumer's credit-card information from the reader and transmits it to the payment-processing system along with relevant data regarding the transaction.
More recent POS systems allow a consumer to pay for a transaction using a mobile device to display a token (often in the form of a barcode or QR code). Like credit cards, mobile device tokens typically contain static information that must be transmitted to a centralized payment-processing system for authentication and payment authorization. An optical or near-field communication (NFC) reader communicates with and obtains the electronic token information and provides this to the POS terminal; in some implementations, the optical reader is the same one used to scan product barcodes for checkout. These various readers and scanners are herein referred to simply as a “reader” (and, indeed, the various data-acquisition capabilities may well be integrated into a single device associated with the POS terminal). The POS terminal combines the token with other transaction information (e.g., the purchase amount and the identity of the merchant) and submits this, directly or via an aggregating transaction server, to the appropriate payment processor to complete the transaction.
The POS terminal, therefore, receives data from multiple sources—potentially at the same time and/or from different sources through the same input device. For example, the cashier may be scanning items or entering data via a POS terminal touchscreen as the consumer presents a token to the reader, or the scanner may read both product barcodes and the consumer's token. The more versatile the reader and the more types of token data it can accept, the greater will be the burden on the POS system to recognize and differentiate among data streams. This burden may be shifted to the cashier, who is then expected to designate, manually, the type of data the POS terminal is about to receive from the reader and thereafter to take further steps to complete the transaction. In sum, there is a need for improved ways of managing the multiple streams of data presented to the POS terminal without merely shifting the burden or lengthening transaction processing.